ProgBlog

The Guardian newspaper occasionally includes a reference to prog - I suspect a couple of the writers are closet fans - but I was surprised when an edition earlier this month had two references: an article about Kate Bush and another about how rock musicians shouldn't have dabbled with disco...

By ProgBlog, May 29 2017 08:47AM

I began listening to Pink Floyd bootlegs, loaned by a school friend, in 1973. It was probably John Bull who also lent me his copy of The Dark Side of the Moon before I went out to buy it, shared with my brother Tony for the princely sum of £1 each, and then I began to probe the Floyd back catalogue starting with the 1971 retrospective Relics and the compilation A Nice Pair. That I loved and was influenced by Dark Side, to the extent that I copied the lyrical motifs when asked to write some poetry for a piece of English Language at school, is undeniable. At the time I wasn’t aware that Dark Side was going to be a massive, record-breaking hit album or that it was the almost perfect realisation of all the Floydian experimentation that had gone before. It may have been one of the closest records to straightforward rock that I owned for many years but it oozed exquisitely tasteful guitar and keyboard work and superlative production values; the between-track segues that render it a nightmare to convert to mp3 bestow a grand concept feel and, last but not least, the package is completed by a simple sleeve design that has become an icon in its own right, enhanced by the posters and stickers that came with the album that graced my walls for many years. The exotic and mysterious pyramids captured my imagination as a 14 year old schoolboy and the prism motif tapped into my love of physics, even appearing as a mandala in the centre of the vinyl, the first time I’d seen a thematic device used in this way.

Record Store Day 2017 release of Interstellar Overdrive

But I also liked the Barrett-era Floyd; the psychedelic whimsy tinged with a darker edge and the sonic exploration best exemplified by Interstellar Overdrive. This was unconventional rock territory, setting the Floyd in the vanguard of bands wishing to move away from the formulaic constraints of the three minute single, not simply by extended jamming but incorporating ideas such as musique concrète. Unfortunately, the diametrically opposed wishes of Barrett and record label EMI (and the other band members who at the time wanted more hit singles), resulting in the recruitment of David Gilmour as guitarist while Barrett was expected to continue to write but not perform was a short-lived idea and Barrett was dropped, though their second album A Saucerful of Secrets was something of a hybrid album between the Barrett- and Gilmour eras. The space-rock Floyd, best preserved on the live half of Ummagumma and the film Live in Pompeii, displays an evolution from the track A Saucerful of Secrets through the Atom Heart Mother suite and Echoes (from Meddle) to Dark Side, where their vision was fully realised. I’m rather dismissive of the soundtrack work for More and Obscured by Clouds and I’m not particularly a fan of the short tracks on the second side of Atom Heart Mother or the first side Meddle (apart from One of These Days.) I think Wish You Were Here is an admirable follow-up to Dark Side, but even as early as 1975 I can detect the seeds of the descent from progressive visionaries to mainstream rock that in my opinion, and I may be a solitary voice here, is of lesser artistic merit. The instrument of change was the strummed acoustic guitar and from a solitary track on Wish You Were Here, it took more of a central role on Animals, bookending the three main tracks as Pigs on the Wing parts 1 and 2 but also appearing in Dogs; simplistic acoustic guitar riffs formed an integral part of The Wall, The Final Cut and, inevitably, the first Roger Waters solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.

Ticket stubs, 1980, 1988 and 1994

I was exceptionally pleased with the reformation of the band in 1987 and the Momentary Lapse of Reason album, believing it to be worthy of the Pink Floyd canon. Even if, as some critics argue, it was initially conceived as a David Gilmour solo project and however brief the input from Mason and Wright, the vision was far removed from any other material released under Gilmour’s own name such that the assembled cast, with progressive credentials bolstered by Tony Levin on bass and Chapman Stick, created a well balanced album that returned the group to the prog fold. I’d seen the Floyd perform The Wall during its first outing at Earls Court in 1980 and though it was an incredible piece of musical theatre, I was never overwhelmed with the music itself. On a hot summer’s day within 24 hours of being exactly eight years later, I saw Pink Floyd on the Delicate Sound of Thunder tour at Wembley Stadium and was totally blown away because both the staging and the set were brilliant. 1994’s The Division Bell crept up on me because at that time I wasn’t closely watching the music press, relying more on a nascent internet but particularly concentrating on all things Crimson. Back as a member of the band, Rick Wright’s input was more evident though apart from Cluster One which harked back to the soundscapes of Wish You Were Here, the instrumental Marooned, the Stephen Hawking-voiced Keep Talking and the epic, grandiose HighHopes, I don’t think it reached the heights of its studio predecessor. However, the Earls Court gig in October that year was another excellent show.

As far as Gilmour and Mason were concerned, the Pink Floyd story didn’t end with the death of Rick Wright in 2008 so The Endless River, largely comprised of sessions recorded with the keyboard player was constructed and released in 2014, an album as eagerly anticipated as Wish You Were Here in 1975. This owed as much to early-Gilmour era Floyd as it did to rehearsals for Lapse and Division Bell, including a portion of Wright playing the Royal Albert Hall organ, some Shine on you Crazy Diamond-like synthesizer noodling and a near reprise of Mason’s solo track from Ummagumma, The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party.

With the 50th anniversary of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn looming and a successful David Bowie exhibition under their belt, the Victoria & Albert museum planned a Pink Floyd exhibition which opened earlier this month. I went along in the first week with long-time friend Jim Knipe and came away very impressed. Towards the end of last year I’d persuaded my family to visit the V&A You Say You Want A Revolution, Records and Rebels 1966 – 1970 which featured the Floyd and indicated how well-thought out their special exhibitions were, so I was looking forward to the event. The recent trawl through the archives that allowed the band to put out the 27 disc The Early Years 1965 – 72 box set unearthed some previously unseen footage and unreleased music, some of which was premiered in an hour-long BBC TV documentary Pink Floyd Beginnings 1967 – 1972, must have coincided with the gestation of Their Mortal Remains. A must for any Floyd fan, the exhibition whose title is adapted from a line in Nobody Home (from The Wall): “Got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains” follows the Floydian timeline from their student days in London (when they called themselves The Tea Set and Sigma Six) to The Endless River, with each album presented in association with video footage, commentary, personal memorabilia, instruments and effects and props.

Visitors are bathed in an early Pink Floyd light show

The timeline is indicated by socially relevant books, magazines and words set inside red telephone boxes; the red telephone box was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea Power Station which is associated with Animals. We tend to think of Pink Floyd as being fairly anonymous; they graced the cover of Piper in 1967, appeared on the cover of Ummagumma in 1969 and again on the inner gatefold of Meddle in 1971, one of my favourite photos of the band, then there wasn’t another picture until David Bailey’s portrait of Gilmour and Mason, looking very much of the zeitgeist, on Lapse in 1987; some might find it strange for a major London museum to put on a special exhibition dedicated to the output of a core of five attention-avoiding musicians but actually, Pink Floyd have now shaken off their relative reserve and are now a cultural touchstone with 50 years of creativity under their belt. There’s even a commemorative set of Royal Mail postage stamps celebrating their albums. This sonic legacy is almost unparalleled so it’s neither unexpected nor unreasonable that their mark on the musical landscape has acquired an establishment-like acceptance and the Johnny Rotten ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt simply a curated memento from the 70s.

The Delicate Sound of Thunder room

My youth was spent poring over musical instrument catalogues and instrumentation listings on album sleeves so I was delighted by the array of original equipment on display. If Rick Wright’s Minimoog is for sale after the exhibition closes, I’d be interested in putting in a bid! I’d always associated the Floyd echo effect with the WEM Copycat but the Barratt-era band used the almost industrial Binson Echorec, a number of which were present along with an array of VCS3 synthesizers; there is a neat hands-on exhibit in the Dark Side section where you can pretend to be Alan Parsons and mix your own version of Money. It wasn’t only the hardware that grabbed my attention; early on was a technical drawing by Roger Waters of Cambridge railway station from the time he was an Architecture student (along with Mason and Wright) at Regent Street Poly and though there were a few references to architecture, I thought there may have been more or better-argued links. I think that the structural element to some of their early post-Barrett compositions demonstrate a form of architectural thinking and one of my son’s friends from university submitted his degree project on Pink Floyd stage shows.

The Division Bell room

The lack of a tour of The Final Cut may explain the relative paucity of material relating to the album on display though the suddenness of the split in the band may itself be reason enough. The law suits and differences between the two camps was largely ignored, Waters seemingly being abruptly cut out of the exhibition from that point, forgotten in the rooms dedicated to Lapse, Division Bell and Endless River however, the final room was a large space dedicated to a presentation of the 2005 Live 8 reunion footage, a nice touch showing an end to the internecine feuding, though not pronouncing on any warming of relations.

The experience is well organised and presented where the strong bond between the band and Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and Peter Curzon is key to the sucess of the concept. The headsets delivering the audio feed are hands free so that when you walk from exhibit to exhibit or room to room, the equipment automatically picks up either ambient feed (Floyd music) or a piece of commentary. I had feared that there would be queues at some of the installations but it was easy to shuffle around without being held up or waiting too long or having to miss something. The whole of Dark Side was played in one room, featuring a rotating 360o view of a beam of light being diffracted through a prism, making it easy to spend three hours at the show. And I plan to return.

By ProgBlog, Jul 31 2016 09:34PM

Progressive rock covers a huge number of themes, even though it is frequently derided for (mistakenly) being a one-topic genre: fantasy, the realm of elves and wizards. Rick Wakeman is less to blame than the music press but a much-used clip of Wakeman on the rocks at Tintagel posing with his Hammond and mini Moogs in cape and wizard’s hat, most recently appearing in the second episode of The People’s History of Pop, presented by writer, journalist, broadcaster and confessed prog fan Danny Baker which was aired on BBC Four last week. This episode related to 1966 to 1976, the years of Baker’s youth and included a piece about progressive rock from the perspective of a (now) Managing Director who was a 14 year old at the time, living in Crawley. The photo he showed of his teenage self could equally have been me captured in 1975. Baker, who should have known better, introduced this section from a record store (he used to work in One Stop Records in central London) by stereotyping glam rock fans, heavy metal fans (circa 1975) and prog fans: “Pale, introverted types, they took things very seriously... ...possibly with a copy of Lord of the Rings with them...” It’s true that we took our music seriously and, even though Hatfield and the North, Supersister, Focus, Zappa showed they could laugh at themselves, the musicians took the music seriously, too. However, I fell into the stereotype yesterday when I listened to the 1982 Jethro Tull album Broadsword and the Beast for the first time for years and was compelled to translate the runes on the cover. I may have done this when I bought the record when it was released, though I’d normally have left a copy of the translation inside the sleeve. I have form in this sort of thing and I imagine that there are many other prog fans who share this thirst for knowledge: I translated all the runes and the elvish script wherever I found them in my copy of Lord of the Rings and I cracked the encrypted letter from Tom to Jan that appears in Alan Garner’s Red Shift. It turns out that the runes on Broadsword and the Beast are Anglo Saxon and they just quote a lyric from the track Broadsword: “I see a dark sail on the horizon set under a cloud that hides the. Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding. Bring me my cross of gold as a talisman.” The word ‘sun’ is missing from the second (bottom) panel because the Ian Anderson elf-like creature’s sword crosses the border at that point, although I don’t believe the three runic letters would have fitted in that space. The artist’s initials can be found top right, with runes for R, I and M plus the superscript ‘c’ for R Iain McCaig. There is more writing on the inside sleeve, indicating that it was ‘scribed by candlelight’.

Part of the earnestness of the musicians was manifest in the choice of subject matter for an album; grand themes, including literary interpretation, being a defining feature of the genre. I think there’s an innate rationality about the music itself and this, as someone who went down the sciences route at school, studied botany and zoology at university and ended up working in a medical science, is part of the appeal. Even something with a meaning as obscure as Close to the Edge works, not just because the musicianship is exemplary but, equally importantly, it has an appropriate structure that helps to convey the rather nebulous concept of seeking enlightenment; prog bands, pushing at the limits of what was sonically possible with the technology available, took on the role musical explorers and experimentalists where their artistic vision was equivalent to a scientist working to a hypothesis.

Flying used as a concept allows a band to utilise threads from a mixture of philosophy, technology and metaphor, from the Greek mythology of Icarus with its warnings against complacency and hubris, through the visions of Leonardo and his principles of mechanical flight, to understanding the physics; I love the parlour trick used in science museums to demonstrate the Bernoulli Principle with the table tennis ball or beach ball in the stream of air, fast flow creates low pressure and, when applied to the upper curved surface of an aeroplane wing, low pressure creates lift. Much of the original space rock concerned exploration, though the imagery of the lyrics for Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, one of my all-time favourite space rock-era Floyd songs, and one of the first Pink Floyd songs I ever heard, seems to relate to a quest to expand the consciousness rather than some kind of starship pilot plotting a course to crash his vessel into a star. Later, David Gilmour would write Learning to Fly (from A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987) which is about genuinely learning the mechanics of flying an aeroplane (the pilot’s voice on the track is Nick Mason going through pre-flight checks) but is also about the liberation of the spirit. I’ve previously written about my appreciation of A Momentary Lapse, and this is because the writing is much more thought-provoking than the last two albums of the Waters era.

The space rock vision of flight is best covered by Hawkwind’s Silver Machine (1972) and the related Robert Calvert solo album Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (1974) which satirised the story of the Lockheed 104 ‘Starfighter’ sold to America’s NATO allies, specifically Germany: the 104G. As a boy, Calvert, who co-wrote Silver Machine, had wanted to be an RAF fighter pilot but it is alleged that he failed the medical. The music on Captain Lockheed is quite varied but the album was originally conceived as a stage play. It’s not really prog, but it is very amusing; my favourite track being the Hawkwind-like Ejection.

Steve Hackett’s Icarus Ascending (Please Don’t Touch, 1978) name checks the son of Daedalus as a metaphor for someone who failed to achieve their goal (in the song, a stable relationship) where successful flight is eventually achieved “Never falling / Since your eyes first touched mine.”

One of the most profound uses of aeroplane and flying metaphors is Flight by Peter Hammill from A Black Box, 1980, Hammill’s first album after leaving Charisma and his first venture into long-form without the help of his Van der Graaf band mates. The side-long track could be compared to the VdGG epic A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers due to the structure comprised of different songs and moods pieced together with a unifying theme, the contemplation of fate and willpower and control. This was a surprise inclusion the last time I went to see Van der Graaf in 2013 although it had been performed by the K Group; the trio did a brilliant job, shifting from the manic to the melodic to the dissonant.

The idea of aeronaut as explorer is raised in Astral Traveller (from Time and a Word, 1970) a track that is almost steampunk with the protagonist being a balloonist within a futuristic-sounding setting. Together with The Prophet, this track seems to map out the future direction of Yes and forms a thematic link to Starship Trooper from the next Yes effort, The Yes Album (1971.)

When Ian McDonald and Michael Giles left King Crimson at the end of the first Crimson US tour in 1969, they put together a melodic, sometimes pastoral album that owes a great deal to the Beatles, where the mellotron is used for colour rather than doomy chords. Some sections (Flight of the Ibis, for example) are recognisable as coming from the Crimson stable, like bits of what would become Cadence and Cascade. The second side of the album is a multi-part suite conceived by Peter Sinfield, The Birdman, and this covers the desire of man to fly and his successful designing and building of the machine. This success is opposite to that described in Paper Wings by Barclay James Harvest (from Everyone is Everybody Else, 1974) where the protagonist is convinced of his ability to fly, but plummets to his death. I have the Barclay James Harvest Live version of this song and, though short, I really like it. The death plunge is a scenario revisited in Suicide? (from Octoberon, 1976.)

I was given a glider flight experience as a birthday present many years ago and headed off to the Surrey Hills Gliding Club based at Kenley, a few miles south of Croydon, for my taster. The sensation of unpowered flight is truly incredible and it’s no wonder that flying and flight has obsessed humankind. Should I ever get the necessary financing, it’s something I’d love to take up seriously.

By ProgBlog, Feb 14 2016 08:04PM

It was Peter Gabriel’s 66th birthday yesterday and the twittersphere was replete with felicitations. Gabriel’s part in the pantheon of progressive rock is firmly cemented: lead vocalist with early Genesis; world music luminary; sonic innovator. I’d like to add that I believe his anti-apartheid stance and his concern for our treatment of the planet are also very prog; promoting environmental issues and equality are key progressive traits, born of late-60s idealism.

There are many more differences between the music on his first solo album Peter Gabriel (1977) and his collaborative previous release, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) than there were between Trespass (1970) and The Lamb. Early Genesis followed a distinct trajectory from compositions that featured 12 string guitar and piano or organ in equal measure overlain by lyrics that were seeped in mythology and allegory, where Gabriel often comes across as vulnerable and tentative. On The Lamb, Gabriel oozes confidence, perhaps aided by the adoption of the Rael persona and the music is heavier, more muscular, involving more riffs than before even though it’s still very melodic. Banks’ use of synthesizer, absent on Foxtrot (1972) and debuting on Selling England by the Pound (1973) is predominantly used for angular runs (such as on In the Cage and Back in NYC.) On reflection, I suggest it’s primarily the synthesizer that’s responsible for the majority of motifs that I’ve detected forming a sonic bridge between Selling England and The Lamb.

The Lamb may be made up of short pieces but it does have an overriding linear narrative that puts it in the long-form category, Supper’s Ready was originally a series of musical ideas that were fitted together to make one piece, similar to Van der Graaf Generator’s A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers (from PawnHearts, 1971) where sections are discrete but seamlessly segue into each other; as a distinct modern musical trope this idea was adopted by The Beatles for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), an idea that was mimicked by any number of proto-progressive acts and one that could be used to define the genre in its infancy. I believe that the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (1967), not fully formed prog by any means, is another good example of a well-defined full album-length concept comprised of disparate songs and this, rather than a nebulous concept like Dark Side of the Moon (1973) or the philosophical musings of Jon Anderson and Steve Howe on Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973), has more parallels with Rael’s journey of self-discovery.

The shorter songs on Peter Gabriel are not conceptually linked but all display thoughtfulness in their composition. This may have been Gabriel’s return to ‘the machinery’ after a hiatus but it was on his terms, informed in part by the years he’d spent in Genesis but reflecting other influences. I don’t think it conforms to the original definition of prog but it is undoubtedly progressive. It’s probably art-rock, with more immediacy and a more contemporary feel. It’s as though Rael showed Gabriel what he was able to become and I think the first solo effort has a New York vibe to it, even though it was recorded in Toronto and London! One similarity between The Lamb and Peter Gabriel is the humour in the rhyme, the use of couplets, half rhymes and rhymes within a single line (the rhyme is planned, dummies) evident, for instance on Moribund the Burgermeister “Bunderschaft, you going daft? Better seal off the castle grounds...” or Humdrum “I ride tandem with a random/Things don’t work out the way I planned them.” However, there’s a less obvious break with prog on Peter Gabriel that hits you the moment you take the album out from wherever you’ve stored it: the cover photo of Gabriel in the passenger seat of Storm Thorgerson’s Lancia Flavia.

It’s probably incidental but the album contains a couple of automobile references, in Excuse Me where Gabriel muses “who needs a Cadillac anyway” and a more technical, almost Ballardian reference to a “red hot magneto” on Modern Love. Despite Nick Mason’s association with motor racing and Rick Wakeman’s collection of cars in the mid 70s, cars don’t often make an appearance in prog rock songs. Is this surprising? Rock ‘n’ roll and the associated ‘live fast, die young’ ethos seem inextricably linked with motor cars and there have been hundreds of songs written about driving and automobiles. This is hardly astonishing as the development of the two aspects of (American) youth culture, music and driving, were contemporaneous; the end of post-war austerity and the invention of the American Dream issuing in a world of leisure and consumerism. Singing about driving could be rebellious but whatever the message, songs about cars pervade much of rock music from Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place to Go (1964) and The Beatles Drive My Car (1965) to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album (1975) and there’s a strong association, at least amongst British TV viewers, of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain (1977) and F1 racing. The movie Grease with its cod 50s rock ‘n’ roll appeared in 1978 and has become the most popular musical film of all time. There even seems to be a morbid glamour that has attached itself to automobile accidents, brilliantly explored in JG Ballard’s collection of related stories The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and full length novel Crash (1973), epitomised by the death of James Dean in his Porsche 550 Spyder in 1955, the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales in Paris in 1997 and even the assassination of JFK in his open topped limousine in 1963 (partly the subject of Gabriel’s Family Snapshot (on Peter Gabriel III, Melt, 1980.)

The lyrics of Adrian Belew on Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984), the second and third releases by the 1981 – 1984 incarnation of King Crimson are something of an exception when it comes to prog and cars. Beat was inspired by Jack Kerouac so road trip references abound in Neal and Jack and Me: “I’m wheels, I am moving wheels/I am a 1952 Studebaker coupe... ...I am a 1952 Starlite coupe”. Crimson journeyed into experimental industrial music on the second side (aka the Right side) of Three of a Perfect Pair, starting with homage to the scrapped car, Dig Me which calls to mind Christine (1983) the Bill Phillips film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel and hints at Ballardian prose. I don’t suppose any of us should be shocked that tyre manufacturer Dunlop used a portion of 21st Century Schizoid Man for adverts in 1996...

A cosmic take on the idea of cruising along was released as a single and appeared on Rain Dances (1977) by Camel in the form of Highways of the Sun. It doesn’t matter if they’re in an old sedan that’s lost a wheel or a ship that’s got no sails, this is hardly the same vision as that visualised by heavy rockers Deep Purple, on Highway Star (from Machine Head, 1972) with its imagery of sexualised power. Hard rock seemed to go for this form of association, the video of ‘fast’ women, hot cars and hard guitars, apparently reinventing scenes of bikini-clad women draped over cars at a motor show for the MTV age... and critics called prog musicians dinosaurs! Even Roger Waters got in on the act with the cover artwork for The Pros and cons of Hitch Hiking (1984.)

One oddity is WhiteCar from Drama (1980) by Yes. Lasting only 1’20” this song was allegedly brought to the band by newcomers Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes. It’s likely to be seen as throw-away because of its brevity but in that time it opens out to reveal a cinematic scope, with nice keyboard orchestration and poignant percussion. I don’t know what the lyrics allude to but I think of a classic Rolls Royce on a road atop of Yorkshire or perhaps Devonshire moors. It’s dramatic, and maybe that’s where the album title comes from; it’s certainly not car as analogy for sex object!

By ProgBlog, Nov 29 2015 08:41PM

The scene: a dimly lit village hall around 7pm in a small rural town in Wiltshire. A group of middle aged men sit on chairs placed in a circle. After a period of silence I start to speak, stuttering, “Erm...my name’s, er 'John' and I like progressive rock music.” In a reassuring voice the bearded man with more than a slight paunch speaks reassuringly “Welcome 'John', it’s OK you are among friends. It is safe here.” That’s how it used to feel when you bared your soul and spoke the bitter truth about your musical interests. Records in gatefold sleeves with science fantasy artwork, intricate fiddly solos, weird time signatures, keyboard players with ten keyboards, drum kits so big they need their own articulated lorry, yep that’s what we prog fans like, but it wasn’t always that way for me.

So, my thanks to Baz for allowing me this guest slot on ProgBlog, and there’s another belated thanks due too. In 1979 we moved to Infield Park in Barrow, I was just 12 with two older brothers, and IP residents Baz and Bill Burford were away at Uni when we arrived, but in a couple of months they arrived back for summer. Now finding great music all by yourself can be pretty difficult and time consuming, so it’s very helpful when big brothers and their friends show you some of what’s out there and help fast track some of your learning.

That learning for me over those first 2 or 3 years included the delights of PFM, Genesis, Pink Floyd, The Nice, “Crimso”, Camel, Yes and Jethro Tull. In fact Baz and Bill bought me a Tull compilation album for my fourteenth birthday, and thus started a life long interest in the band. It probably came back to haunt them because by the time I was 16 or 17 I was a full on Tull bore, following the band on several dates on the same tour, having Tull pen friends and gaining an encyclopaedic knowledge of the band which I just had to share with everyone. I can still be a bit of a Tull bore now but I’m more socially adept these days.

Postcard from Dave Pegg. Photo (c) Mike Chavez

So I was given a great grounding, but as brothers and older friends completed studies and moved away exposure to new and undiscovered prog become less and less, and my interest in other music started to grow. Flirtations with The Stranglers, Ramones, The Smiths, Elvis Costello and R.E.M. took place, and they sat alongside my prog faves and jostled for attention.

In 1988 I left Barrow for the bright lights of Newcastle. I stayed there for the next eleven years and never again called Barrow my home. What Barrow lacked Newcastle had in spades – great music venues, record shops, pubs without gits, culture (!), a variety of wide minded people to meet, learn from and share things with. During my years in the Toon I bought an average of three albums a week, saw 80 – 100 gigs a year as a student, and expanded my musical horizons to places I never thought I’d go. I went on a proper musical journey and it was bloody brilliant.

Tull ticket September 1984. Photo (c) Mike Chavez

Prog was forgotten, the old records mostly allowed to gather dust (although Floyd and Tull still got a regular airing). I found punk and blues, I then found Funk, Blue Note, Latin and Brazilian as my tastes veered towards black American music and great rhythms. James Brown, The Meters, Horace Silver, Art Blakey; Howlin’ Wolf; Gil Scott-Heron...they collectively elbowed out the polite English prog rockers. As my record collection grew and grew it was regularly taking twenty minutes to dig out the next album I wanted to play, so I decided to sort them out alphabetically - in two categories:- “black music” and “white music”. There’s only two sorts of music right?

Then one I day in the mid to late ‘90s I randomly pulled out Close to the Edge by Yes and put it on. I was propelled back ten years to the last time I’d played it, and it was like finding this thoroughly gripping music for the first time, but I knew every word! Perhaps this prog stuff was worthy of a re-look after all. Slowly prog reclaimed its place next to the rest of them, and that’s where it’s remained to this day – a treasured friend amongst other treasured friends.

So what to make of the musical journey? It’s been great, and it continues of course. The added joy of the musical journey compared with a ‘travelling’ journey, and I’ve done lots of those too, is that you don’t have to leave anything behind, you really can take it all with you. In fact I’ve got a 160GB iPod so I can actually take the majority of it with me wherever I go.

Now let it not be said that I have any musical ability whatsoever, I don’t. I can’t even clap in time for more than about four seconds, but as my musical experience has grown I’ve been able to better see the depth of all this music, to pick out the great bits, the subtle bits, the really clever bits, the bits where the simplicity is the key, and also the dross that should never be heard again. I’m proud to be a widely travelled musical snob, it’s taken a lot of time, effort and money to get there and I won’t be giving it up that easily I can tell you.

Nature always looks for the simplest and most efficient ways to do things, and it’s wonderful to hear something stunning in its brilliance, yet simplicity. John Lennon was the master of it lyrically, and I’d throw The Buzzcocks, Muddy Waters and Buddy Holly in there too (musically). But sometimes...sometimes you just need something a bit more than that, where the sheer intricacy and complexity of the music, and the level of skill needed for a group of people to work together in perfect understanding to navigate their way through it is what impresses and challenges us. That’s where yer Blue Note Jazz, yer String Quartets and yer Prog comes in!

So the journey has taken me full circle, to a degree, and I’m out of the prog closet. It’s a dear old friend again and not a dirty little secret, and now and again I even get to see some of it live - in recent years I’ve caught up with the likes of Tull, Yes, Focus and Roger Waters, as well as some non-prog too of course. And at this point in the musical journey, and with all that experience gathered, I can say there’s still only two sorts of music – but it’s good and bad, and it’s not always black and white.